regarding the players brand,SONY is best in durability and yet its popular,SAMSUNG and PHILLIPS is best in LCD's,PIONEER,BOSCH and KENWOOD is best if you like the sounds much better,SHARP and LG are also good in Durability wise,you can choose one of those brands if you want to buy a DVD player that can play CD's.Coz DVD is built to play VCD's.that's what we called innovation.Make things much easy and continues improvement.